Down the Rabbit Hole
In Dec 2019, the Indian Govt was spearheading an amendment in the Indian Citizenship law. The law was alleged to be discriminating against citizens on the basis of religions. There were protests all over the country. But what was represented on TV channels and online news sites was such a frustrating sight that one day I started to dig deep into how news was reported and how we could try to do it better. Below are some of the observations.
News reporters take sides because that gets them an audience.
Studies highlight that channels which aid viewers to reach a decision attract a larger audience than channels that try to do a balanced reporting covering multiple perspectives of a story.
History and context are edited out of stories
Presenting history and context takes time & intent. To shape events into a narrative, contexts are often edited in & out.
News Businesses rely on other Businesses and Government for money.
They cannot upset their customers.
There is so much of information out there!
While information is produced breathtakingly fast these days, our human brains have limited capacity to process it. Receiving new information means lesser mind-space for old information.
Slappsuit cases
And if anyone gets upset, they can sue news institutes! These days they even sue Stand up comics. John Oliver does a fantastic job of explaining Slappsuit cases so why don’t you just check out his video on Slappsuit cases here
This is no way an exhaustive list of reasons but good enough to make someone stand up and take action!
Political Beings
After staying frustrated for days, I eventually decided to do news reporting myself along with my partner Jahnavi Meher. Our focus was on these 4 aspects specifically:
Less News - We are all suffering from Information fatigue. Delivering lesser news might help people to consume it meaningfully.
Located in Context- Do research before presenting a story. Find historical precedents. Find social context, economic, foreign policy context… whichever is applicable and present the story located in that context. This way at-least people will find out that real-world events are not simple or linear as they are being presented on TV.
Short Bullet Narrative- Will you read a long-form update on political news every day? I didn’t think so and based on my personal experience with Axios style reporting, we went with a bullet point approach versus long-form.
Delivered to your Inbox- Send it to people before they go out on the internet.
We based our reporting on these principles. And created a small group of 15 people for testing out our reporting principles, the market and our writing skills. Our entire product was managed on Notion and Mailchimp. Grammarly ensured that we sounded better than we actually were. Sources like Medianama, The Wire, Indiaspend, Livelaw and a few more helped us uncover sides of stories that weren’t being covered in the mainstream media. Axios and The Ken were inspirations that we looked up to. Below are some stories from Political Beings.
Home base for Political Beings on Notion
We started to get burned out with consuming so much information and re-checking everything. During this period, we tried to switch our default “simple is great!” mindset to “embrace the complexities” mindset but it led to information fatigue, burnout and a little bit of existential crisis. It became impossible to juggle it along with our day jobs so we paused it.
You can read some of the editions here.
Note: I am still interested in how News will transform over the coming decades. If you are a news business/entrepreneur tackling the challenges outlined above (or other challenges), and need a UX or Design person, feel free to reach out!